


Mamá Set Me Free

by hotot



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Coming of Age, Followers of the Apocalypse (Fallout), Gen, Kindness, Motherhood, Neurodiversity, Nonbinary Character, Parent-Child Relationship, this is WHOLESOME okay?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-07
Updated: 2020-10-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:53:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 924
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26879251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hotot/pseuds/hotot
Summary: To Bunny, grown and five years departed from the Followers, Mamá seems near-mythological. A desert witch, touched by a goddess of the nomadic hearth. A mother to hundreds.Bunny's got a big ol' tattoo of a heart on their arm, the word "Mamá" inscribed inside. This is why.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 9





	Mamá Set Me Free

**Author's Note:**

> Started as a "family" headcanon and turned into a dabble. I just really love the idea of the Followers raising little anarchist children that run wild everywhere they go.

Bunny’s first memories were filled with a riotous diversity of children and of a miraculous, middle aged woman with granite-speckled hair and skin as brown as theirs, though cool instead of warm.

People called her Mamá. If she had any other name, Bunny never learned it. Mamá was a Follower of the Apocalypse, responsible for taking in lost children and caring for them until they found their way home, or found a new one, or they no longer needed care. She cared for them, and like a true Follower, taught them that a great war had changed the world, but not broken it. They were still here, after all. 

Bunny’s childhood was shaped by Mamá’s very essence: the textures of homemade fabrics she spun and wore and crafted into clothes for the children; the taste of her cooking; the almost-on-key songs she would sing. Each child got their own lullaby. Her stories always imparted lessons, she had a saying for every situation, and she knew every animal. Mamá accepted every child, just as they were. But more, she helped them find their places in the world. She was a caregiver, a healer, a midwife, and a mentor.

To Bunny, grown and five years departed from the Followers, Mamá seems near-mythological. A desert witch, touched by a goddess of the nomadic hearth. A mother to hundreds.

Mamá’s biggest influence on Bunny was trust. Bunny has what Mamá called a “honeycomb mind.” She saw creativity in the way they could think on their feet and learn a little about a lot, very quickly. How they soaked up the natural world around them like parched earth in a flood. And mostly, a daring wisdom in the way they expressed their feelings. Mamá honored their adventurous and independent spirit. It was not without reason that she named them after the desert jack-lope. With every new horizon the Followers chased, Bunny would go haring off to meet the local children, explore the wilderness, and come back wild eyed and trembling in awe the vastness of the world.

But Mamá also taught balance in all things. Alongside this early freedom, Bunny grew a sense of responsibility towards their sprawling and ever-changing family of siblings and caretakers, with Mamá as a warm and constant center. Bunny would play games to teach the little ones about foraging for food, took up the sacred mantel of peacekeeper when other children got in scraps, and helped Mamá with her weaving and sewing, and her cooking. It was Mamá who made them their first binder, and made them clothes that felt right when their body started changing in ways didn’t match how they saw themself.

Life was rugged, rough cut, and not without its dangers. But it was safe because Mamá put her children first.

Around the time they turned seventeen, Bunny’s clan of Followers ended up in the Mojave, and Bunny fell in love for the first time. They fell in love with the Mojave sky, the desert, the taste of sun on the scorched air, and the deceptive emptiness of a landscape teeming with secret life. And as it often happens with first love, Bunny learned new lessons. Falling in love with the Mojave taught Bunny about difficult choices, and heartbreak, and leave-takings.

Mamá would not stay in the Mojave. She would not put her children at risk amid the volatile politics between Raiders, Tribes, the Legion, the NCR, and Vegas. Mamá had a new generation to nurture, and the Mojave was going through growing pains. Mamá did not trust it.

So Bunny was faced with a choice. They were grown. They expected a life with the Followers, intended to join the handful of other young adults apprenticed to Mamá's hearth-craft. But the desert was in Bunny’s blood in a different way.

The night before Mamá and all but a small contingent of Followers were set to leave, Bunny sweated over their impending decision. They wandered the outskirts of Freeside, unsure of what they were looking for, but looking anyway. They fount it in an artist who drew on people’s bodies in forever ink. She showed Bunny a faded and carefully guarded old-world magazine of people covered in tattoos. In it, Bunny saw a picture of a man rippling with muscles. On his bicep was a heart pierced with an arrow, the word “Mother” inscribed in flowing letters within.

When they showed Mamá the tattoo on their arm, Mamá laughed, and they both wept. And Bunny walked with their family of two-dozen all the way to the Mojave Outpost, a scout and an honor guard. And beneath the Unification Monument, Bunny said "until I see you again, Mamá.”

Bunny never had much use for time-telling. But this time, they counted each day that passed since Mamá left the Mojave, until their eyes were dry at last.

And Bunny hared off into their new life with mind and eyes wide open. They would try everything, because Mamá knew they could do anything. If Mamá thought it was true, it was true. And in many ways, it _was_ true. They became Courier Six, after all.

The only real failing of Bunny’s childhood at Mamá‘s elbow was that they were never taught about power, and caps, and cruelty. They weren’t prepared for the decisions they would be forced to make when, against all odds--or perhaps because of them--they rose from an early grave.

But they keep laughing through, hare-wild with a puckish smile, whispering a mantra: “Mamá ain't gonna believe a word of it.”

**Author's Note:**

> You can't tell me that midwives aren't witches. I also tried to think of a different way of describing ADHD that wasn't so framed in oppressive western medicine. That would be the "honeycomb mind."


End file.
